Sure Shot

Jack Reacher doesn't have baggage, literally or metaphorically. A former military police officer, he decided to drop off the grid and live life by his own rules. “It started as an exercise and became an addiction” is how the tough-as-nails hero describes his lifestyle, which sees him drift from town to town with little more than the shirt on his back and the toothbrush in his pocket.

He's answerable to no one except his own code of conduct...and that code occasionally sees him bumping up against some unsavoury types who prey on the vulnerable or the defenceless. And when that happens, Reacher is usually the one who bumps hardest.

Reacher is, of course, fictional, the hero of UK author Lee Child's series of bestselling novels – 17 at last count – that have seen the character tangle with every form of bad guy under the sun. With millions of Reacher adventures sold worldwide, it was only a matter of time before he made his way to the big screen.

What few Reacher fans could have anticipated, however, is that he'd be embodied by Tom Cruise.

On the page, Reacher is a tree of a man, tall, broad and muscular. Cruise, although he's in ripping shape for a man nudging 50, doesn't quite fit that particular bill. And there have been more than a few devotees of Child's books who initially took issue with the casting of the star in Jack Reacher, the new action-thriller based on Child's novel One Shot.

According to the film's screenwriter and director Christopher McQuarrie, though, focusing solely on Reacher's physique does the character a disservice.

“The physicality of Reacher in the books, while it's very explicit or because it's very explicit, can almost eclipse in the mind's eye what is important about Reacher's character, which is his character, his approach, his mindset, his attitude, his tone,” says McQuarrie, an Oscar winner for his Usual Suspects screenplay.

“I'm very respectful of the fans who have invested in this brand – when you buy a book, you're a stockholder in the Reacher brand – but there are many facets to this character and too much emphasis on any one of them would dilute the overall.”

Jack Reacher is McQuarrie's second film as a director, and it's been more than a decade since his debut feature, the gritty, violent crime drama The Way of the Gun. But he's collaborated with Cruise on projects like Valkyrie and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and calls their friendship and creative relationship “an ongoing conversation about movies with no plan”.

Cruise's production company had held the rights to the Reacher novels for some time when McQuarrie was brought on board to discuss adapting and directing One Shot for the screen. 

“When this was presented to me, my immediate assumption was that it was a movie for me to direct, not a movie in which Tom would star,” he says.

“Looking at the pedigree of the directors Tom had worked with before, I was unproven on that level. So I never presumed Tom would be in a movie that would be my second feature in 12 years. The beauty of that was when I gave him the script I was genuinely giving it to him in his capacity of producer of the movie. I didn't have the unpleasant experience of having to offer him a script, hope he would read it swiftly and hope he would say yes. I was literally waiting for his notes as a producer and a collaborator. And when he came back to me, he said 'Look, I don't know who you have in mind to play this guy but I'd love to do it'.”

McQuarrie was happily stunned when Cruise made his play but wanted to ensure the actor knew what he was getting into.

“I said to him 'Are you sure you want to do this? Because it's very different from any character you've played before. To my way of thinking, you usually play characters who are under extreme pressure and in pursuit of the object of the plot. And this is a character who does not experience pressure and will not pursue anything. This is somebody who very calmly sits back and waits for the movie to come to him',” he recalls.

“As I said this to Tom, there was this almost imperceptible shift – you could feel him settle into his chair and there was this 'Oh, God, I would love to play that'. Like he'd been looking for that and hadn't articulated it. So the fun of the movie was finding the ways in which he could relax into scenes that would normally be about normally, finding ways for him to relax under intense pressure while maintaining the tension.”

It all creates an interesting dynamic in the movie, which sees Reacher drawn into a deadly conspiracy that begins with a sniper seemingly killing five random strangers. McQuarrie wanted to ensure Jack Reacher had a sense of danger and gravity while also allowing room for a tough, sardonic sense of humour.

“Lee Child wanted to create an iconic detective who didn't have all the baggage all the other detectives did – characters like Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade all appear sort of haunted, and Reacher doesn't feel that way,” he says.

“He likes the life that he lives. And the pleasure of this project is that it didn't have that kind of darkness. It opened it up to that kind of humour that at the same time didn't diffuse the danger. We wanted the threats and the violence to be very, very real. We wanted the villains to be threats that needed to be neutralised but at the same time we didn't want the movie to have this insurmountable tone.”

The biggest challenge McQuarrie faced, though, was conveying the brilliant analytical mind of Reacher – the character is as much an investigator as he is a bruiser – without resorting to reams of expository dialogue.

“The books spend so much time in Reacher's head,” says McQuarrie. “They're so much about his thought process, his outlook and how he processes the world around him. Finding ways to visualise that and not turning him into someone who was constantly explaining himself and his actions became a matter of creating a world where the perspective is constantly shifting. There are times in the movie where it's very clearly from Reacher's point of view; there are times when it's clearly from the point of view of other people.”

According to McQuarrie, the role of Reacher was a good fit for Cruise. “What was really exciting to me was to be able to put Tom in a role where he's playing somebody closer to himself – someone who's a lot cooler, a lot more relaxed, a lot more amiable. What we were going for with Reacher is not really an intensity but more a matter-of-factness.  He seems to understand how everything is going to happen around him and is just waiting for it to occur.”

Such a hero needs a suitable enemy, and Jack Reacher sees the title character pitted against a brutal, ruthless henchman played by Australian actor Jai Courtney and a 'big bad' played, in an inspired casting decision, by legendary German filmmaker Werner Herzog.  

“He takes such delight in, to use his words, a character who is debased,” laughs McQuarrie, who told casting director Mindy Marin he wanted someone European and not necessarily widely-known to play 'The Zec', the cold-blooded crime boss behind the conspiracy.

“I felt he would feel more real and more threatening if he was someone not immediately identifiable. There were very good actors I'd worked with before and want to work with again that we thought about reaching out to for this role, and when Mindy suggested Werner I thought it was very inspired but there was also a real risk because I didn't know what I'd get. That almost dictated that I had to do it.

“People ask what it's like working with this actor or that actor – we have Robert Duvall, Richard Jenkins and so many great actors in this movie – but the moment I'm truly geeking out is the moment I have Tom Cruise and Werner Herzog in the same frame.”

McQuarrie is in demand as a screenwriter, and he's been involved in a number of upcoming big-ticket projects, including The Wolverine (“the script I handed them, I was the proudest of it than any I've worked on”). And his collaboration with Cruise is set to continue, not on a rumoured Top Gun sequel – “they're the rumours that will not die,” he laughs – but a new Mission: Impossible adventure.

“We are in the very early stages of talking about Mission and figuring that out,” he says. “That to me is the much more intimidating mission, especially following Ghost Protocol. The action is actually where I'm at home. I'm exciting about that. What's most daunting is the style of the Mission: Impossible franchise – the scope and the elegance of those movies is very much in contrast to what I've done so far, which is, as you aptly described it, street level. I'm gonna have to clean up my act!”